The Last Exile

Ynet News:

At around 5 am last Thursday, residents of Hankin Street in Holon were awakened by loud noises coming from an apartment in the area. Annoyed by the ostentatious groans and moans, they called the police. Four officers were alerted to the designated home.
 
“I opened the door to the police covered in a pillow, with my partner wearing nothing but underwear,” the recently detained woman told Ynet. “The officers’ accusations and their aggressive attitude shocked me, so I answered them cynically.”
 
But the officers were apparently not amused. They assigned the noisome couple a fine of almost $100 at the scene, after the woman asked the female cop whether she did not emit similar vocalizations while performing intercourse. But there was more to come. When the couple descended the stairs in an attempt to get the fine revoked, the officer asked the woman for her ID. When the latter refused, she and her partner were cuffed on the spot, and forcefully inserted into the police cruiser.
 
They were placed in custody, and criminal records were filed against them for insulting a public official, a charge that carries a prison sentence of up to six months.

Personally, its been my long held belief that all government officials deserve to be insulted and mocked daily as a trade off for the coercive force they so often weld over our lives and freedoms.

Or no good deed goes unpunished. Shas party is rumoured to be the most bribable of all Israeli political parties but apparently the Neturei Karta (crazy Jews you always see playing kissy-face with Ahmadinejad) didn’t get the memo. Ynet News:

Interior Minister Eli Yishai was pelted with stones on Monday as he arrived at the Mea Shearim neighborhood in Jerusalem for a condolence visit at the home of Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv. A group of Neturei Karta members, known for their radical opinions against Israel and Zionism,began chanting at the Shas chairman, “Shegetz” (non-Jewish boy) and “Zionist”. Some punctured the tires of his car and hurled stones at him. The minister escaped unharmed and hid in the rabbi’s yard. Police forces were dispatched to the area to disperse the crowd.

I always shegetz meant an abomination in reference to non-kosher food…but hey, what do I know? Good on Yishai for even considering to do a mitzvah around one of the nutbars.

This is one of those posts in which I don’t have a great deal of comment (I wish to share at this time). I have been following this story as it developed (dig deep in the archives). This post serves as a benchmark for me but its a story which should be told. Yoel Zilberman’s gave this address to a Jerusalem conference recently and Arutz Sheva was good enough to translate it. There is a video but its in Hebrew and its without subtitles. I think its an incredibly important speech, perhaps even the most important one any Israeli will give this year. I don’t want to shorten it or attempt to summarize it. I will leave the contact details at the bottom.

Three and a half years ago, just after the operation in Lebanon, for those who remember – the Second Lebanon War,  one could say even during the course of the Second Lebanon War, when missiles were falling in villages in the Galilee and an Arab girl was killed by a Hizbullah missile that hit her village, her father called his daughter a shaheeda (martyr). In the Galilee. Not in Judea and Samaria or anywhere else in the world. At that time I was a combat soldier in that operation, in the army. And there was a feeling that we’d lost the war. The main feeling was that the nation felt weak; the nation felt that it was not making it. Ehud Olmert summed it up when he said: “we are tired of wars.” 

A short time later – my father, who has a herd of cattle on a 5,000 dunam area north of Tzipori in the lower Galilee, sits us down to Friday supper and tells us: I am bankrupt. There is a tribe of Bedouins that has been cutting my fences for many years, invading my territory, threatening to murder me, slaughtering cows on my property and generally doing whatever they want. I have filed 240 complaints with the police. And nobody even looks in my direction. He simply told us, his family: ‘I have decided to abandon 2,500 dunam. I can’t hold on to this territory any more.’

At the time I was at a crossroads, about to start an officers’ course in the army, and I told my father ‘over my dead body, this is not going to happen.’ We organized, me and several friends from my army crew, we bought an old Renault Express, and started visiting the territory. There are some dignitaries here who have already visited me there to see the container-on-wheels we lived in for two years. In the past year we upgraded it to a caravan. Everything is legal, the authorities signed the paperwork, because we understood that in the Galilee, the laws are a little different.

We put up an Israeli flag and we brought some books – only books on Judaism and Zionism. And we started going to the fields every day after operations and training, to guard the land, fight the Bedouins and make them leave. When we would call the police, the policeman on duty would tell us: ‘if you call me one more time I am coming to arrest you.’     

There are 15 authorities in the country – police, Border Police, JNF, et cetera – that do not have the guts to do their job on the ground. Now, in the course of this process three and a half years ago, I learned that when one talks to the youth in the Land of Israel – by the way, I am not religious and I come from a nonreligious social background, like most Israelis – when you talk to young people in this society, and ask them ‘what story to you know?’, they can tell all of you the name of the brother of the cousin of the grandmother of Harry Potter; but when you ask them ‘who is Rambam?’ [Maimonides] – they can’t even tell you if it is the name of a hospital; and if you ask them if they know what the names Berl Katznelson or [Yitzchak] Tabenkin or [Ze'ev] Jabotinsky stand for [early Zionist leaders, ed.] – the best case scenario is that they will say ‘a street in Tel Aviv.’

And you come to understand that this generation’s oxygen and strength are mostly ‘Survivor’ and ‘Big Brother’, the ‘reality’ TV shows – that is what gives them their insights and  thoughts and connection to the Land of Israel. And that is why in the end, when cracks form, the vacuum [is filled by] the other side. I don’t care about the Arabs per se. They could have been Filipinos or any other nation. There are  Israeli Jews do not feel that the Land of Israel belongs to them, and that is our story. 

And from my father’s story, as I started guarding the territory and living there, I start hearing dozens of stories about kibbutzim and moshavim that have already abandoned their land, after Bedouins made their lives miserable for dozens of years.

Three  years ago, Kibbutz Kfar HaNassi abandoned 4,000 dunams. Simply left the territory. The Bedouin village Tuba-Zangaria has already invaded the territory and is building illegally. Kibbutz Amiad – 13,000 dunams. Moshav Alonei Aba – 2,000 dunams. And the stories continue.

Then cattle herders and agriculturalists start coming to me and saying ‘Yoel, save us.’  Amir Engel of Tel Adashim who survives an attempt to murder him. Motti Peretz of Har Tur’an in Beit Rimon who survives an attempt to murder him. And you suddenly realize that these people are truly alone out in the field. And on that same day we decide to organize and form a group. [Former President] Yitzchak Ben-Tzvi wrote in his book ‘The History of the Haganah’ that when the state abandons its citizens – and by the way, it is not just abandoning them, it is torturing them and making sure that they lose their strength – he says, those citizens have no alternative but to unite and learn to defend each other.

And at that moment we decide – the whole group of guys. And they are all guys who served in the army. Most of them were in special units. And they all love this country. They are all happy to live here. None of them is confused. They all know the [Talmudic] phrase ‘know from whence you came.’ They know their story and know where they are going. And from this we decide that we will form something called the New HaShomer. Because we are not inventing anything. Because 100 years ago there was the same group of Jews here that arrived in the Land of Israel and the same type of government was torturing them too. And we understand that at that moment we are renewing the concept of mutual responsibility. Of people who come together to save a person.

We have more than 600 volunteers now. Guys who give between 7 and 20 days of reserve duty annually. Who come up to the agriculturalist or cattle farmer and say to him – ‘go sleep at home with your wife tonight, we are guarding the territory. Because it is true that you are making money off of it but it is ours. It is our story. And when you meet these cattle men who tell you: ‘my wife says, either we divorce or you leave the land,’ you simply save these people.

We have seven pre-military academies and yeshivas whose students regularly come to these lands and guard them. Young people who join these agriculturalists and work with them day to day.

Last week we made history. Maybe you have heard of pre-military academies like Eli or Atzmona and such, or the pre-military ’service year’ for guys who finish high school. We have over 230 candidates, boys, for whom we held very difficult training, to find the twenty or thirty guys who will live like King David, as we like to say. Every group of 8-10 guys will live on an outpost and be in charge of a flock of sheep.

They will study Torah in the morning. They will study Zionism in the evening. They will learn Arabic so the [Arabs] will understand we do not delude ourselves that we live in France or Holland; they must realize they are in the Middle East. And these guys with the flocks of sheep, and the Full Contact training and running and training, will bring back the courage of the Jew in the Land of Israel. The Jew who observes more commandments and the one who observes less, they are all the same to us. And in the end you see deep, long term processes. People join. By the way, some people come to do guard duty and some contribute – either their money or their assistance with equipment of some kind.

Everybody feels that they want to be a part of this thing. And this thing keeps growing: every week at least 60 people join. We hold three to seven lectures a week. We get 3-6 requests for help every week. A guy called Oz Davidian from the Negev called me a year ago. He told me – ‘Yoel, three weeks ago, three Bedouins came. They found me alone in my ranch and they beat me half to death senseless with metal rods. Why? Because. Because he holds 1,500 dunams and they want him to stop holding them. Three weeks later, he says, the same Bedouins come and steal all of his sheep too. He says to me: ‘If you do not come here tonight, these guys will murder me.’ In this situation, I bring along three volunteers from the North. We do not have a car, we hitch rides at 2:00 AM and arrive at his field. I find a person who is a pile of bones. Anorexic. He hasn’t left his farm for four months. He couldn’t leave his farm. He has a court order forbidding his young daughter from visiting him there because it is dangerous. In the Negev.

I sit with 20 pilots in the Negev. At Nevatim Air Base, between Arad and Be’ersheva. 20 pilots. Arrowheads. They tell us that their base commander forbids them from traveling on the road from Arad to Be’ersheva. Why? Because Bedouins throw washing machines and boulders on the road, the cars stop suddenly. They take the soldiers out of the vehicles and they beat them up. So they are told to drive to their base a roundabout way, through Dimona.

I always say that the fortified walls that protect our land are the open spaces. The fortified walls of Jerusalem are the cattlemen and agriculturalists with the 4 million dunams of state land. That is what protects our country. Whoever thinks that ‘the state of Azrieli [a Tel Aviv shopping mall]‘ will save us is confused.  

And from all of this we see that by 2015 we will have more than 2,000 guards, at least 6,000 total volunteers, and at least 30 nucleus groups like I described of 8-10 pre-army guys with the sheep on the land, going back to the roots, and relearning their own story, and not being confused by anyone, and then there will be no cracks and confusion, and the entire world will know who this belongs to. This includes the Arabs by the way. They are simply waiting for us to tell them – ‘this is ours.’ They haven’t understood this yet. They are waiting and with the help of G-d, long term processes will make this happen.       
        
HaShomer HaChadash can be contacted through Philip Bar-Yosef at bigshraga@hotmail.com.

These two seemingly unrelated headlines grabbed my attention this morning. Arutz Sheva:

Rabbi Schmidt, 43, is the Rosh Yeshiva (head) of the Hesder Yeshiva in the community, and is also the Rabbi of the town of Shavei Shomron.
According to the rabbi’s wife, Ofra, some 200 policemen arrived at the community Monday with bulldozers to demolish four structures that were being built, allegedly in contravention of the current freeze order on construction by Jews in Judea and Samaria. The bulldozers drove through the yeshiva compound, which adjoins some of the property that was razed. The rabbi instructed some twenty yeshiva students who were present not to confront the police.

On their way back from the demolitions, she said, the destruction crews wanted to pass through the yeshiva grounds once again, although there was an alternate route. This time, the rabbi parked his vehicle in a way that blocked the bulldozers’ way and asked them not to pass through the yeshiva compound, which is private property.
Upon hearing this the police beat the rabbi, knocked him down and continued to beat him severely when he was on the ground. He did not require medical attention, she said, but expressed horror at the fact that Jewish police would beat a rabbi, even after being told that he was a rabbi. 

So the Yassam strike (literally) without an eye to the optics of attacking a rabbi on Yeshiva property. The days when this kind of incident would pass without anyone outside of the immediate circle are long gone with the internet but the fact that the Yassam continue to operate from an exaggerated sense of entitlement without regard for the laws of Israel speaks volumes to lack of accountability the Minister of Defense holds his department to as long as Jews are his chosen victims.

The second is announcement from Moshe Feiglin. Arutz Sheva:

Moshe Feiglin, head of the Manhigut Yehudit oppositional faction within the Likud party, has decided to leave the Likud along with his movement, Makor Rishon reported Friday.
Feiglin has called a meeting of the central activists in Manhigut Yehudit for Sunday, in which he intends to announce his decision. He will recommend that the movement seek its political home outside Likud. On the record, Feiglin would only tell Makor Rishon that “we are in a period of internal inquiries that will last about two weeks and we are involving the activists in the dilemmas.”

(…)Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu has seen Feiglin as his nemesis within Likud, and accused him of trying to effect a hostile takeover of the Likud with the aim of turning it into a religious party. “We are not an extremist messianic party; we are a national and liberal movement,” he said ahead of the latest confrontation with Feiglin.

That confrontation took place late April and centered on an internal Likud vote to change the party’s constitution in a way that would put off to 2011 the elections to its central committee. The move was seen as a bid to prevent Feiglin from gaining strength in the party’s grassroots leadership and to give Netanyahu time to add more moderate grassroots members to Likud, to offset the ones that Feiglin had brought in.
Feiglin said the showdown would ultimately determine the fate of Jerusalem. Netanyahu, he warned emotionally, wants to silence opposition in the Likud because he has made a secret pact with US President Barack Obama that involves partitioning Jerusalem. Several Likud Knesset members, including Danny Danon, Tzipi Hotovely and Yariv Levin, also opposed Netanyahu’s move – but Netanyahu succeeded in passing the resolution anyway. This last failure is what seems to have convinced Feiglin to leave the Likud and essentially abandon his decade-long project. 

While on first glance these two stories seemingly have nothing to do with each other; they both speak to the democratic deficit within Israeli politics. Feiglin would have been sitting in the Knesset if Netanyahu hadn’t given into subverting his own political party’s process – not once, but many times in pursuit of keeping Feiglin’s Jewish leadership out of power within the Likud. Feiglin’s fraction makes up at least 25-30% of the Likud membership base and has acted as a straw to draw away support from the national religious camp in general elections.

Netanyahu may think the Likud can make-up a 25-30% loss of membership by poaching from Kadima – and Bibi may be right but what he doesn’t seem to fully comprehend is the potential to harm Likud interests Feiglin’s membership represents; if Feiglin decides to do something fresh, creative and controversial…which just happens to be a Feiglin hallmark.

The natural fit for Feiglin’s fraction is to opt to join the National Union and I expect Bibi is counting on that as the impact on national elections wouldn’t be all that much to write back to the diaspora about but if Feiglin wants to keep to his strategy of joining the mainstream political process and influencing change his way; he would be far further ahead to keep his to his strategy and join forces with…Ysrael Beiteinu.

Not to mention the humongous entertainment value I would get watching such a merger but it could potentially mark Yisrael Beiteinu as a fraction too large to be denied no matter if Kadima or Likud took the most mandates. If Yisrael Beiteinu could successfully integrate its party platform with Feiglin’s Jewish Leadership fraction it could potentially lead Israel in the years to come when the country is set to undergo another demographic first – transitioning from a secular Jewish majority to a religious Jewish majority. If I was Lieberman, I’d be calling Moshe.

Can you imagine Lieberman and Moshe both sitting across the table from the Palestinian Authority in ‘direct’ negotiations? I almost (not quite)feel sorry for the Palestinian Authority but the one thing no Jew anywhere in the world would be worrying about is whether Lieberman or Feiglin dividing up Jerusalem.

Finally, someone says aloud what most of us have been thinking for sometime. Bernie Farber may not be anyone’s ideal of the cavalry but at least his grasp of Jewish ethnics is impeccable. Here is a portion of his speech given at Shaar Shalom synagogue.

(Hat tip goes to Big City Liberal. Yes, I read him. He is in my reader and while I don’t always agree with what he writes – at least he still writes rather than market his blog as cyber answer to the shopping channel.)

“Our view of the universe was so limited that all we could do was talk about the connection between words and actions. Len was, in the loud and proud words of this blogger, “to stupid to be a Jew”. He had other things to say as well, including derisive comments on a perceived physically disability that he wrongly claimed Len had.

Did I mention that the blogger in question was Jewish? Is this the way that one member of the community publicly speaks of another? By engaging in ad hominen attacks? By referring to physical characteristics? This is the sort of thing one expects to find in the schoolyard. The behaviour is no less acceptable because the practitioner is in his 40’s rather than 14. Indead, this is not a “one-off”. This same Jewish blogger who upholds the rights of neo-nazis to malign Jews, has referred to other Jewish professionals as “liars, cowards, moochers” and has made consistent references to me as a “nazi book-burner’.

(…)
He is not the only one. The blogsphere is sadly replete with bullies, jerks, racists, homophobes, and bigots. But here my friend is the kicker, these same racists, bigots and misogynists all ‘love’ Israel and as a result there are those in our community who will tolerate them, even accept them.

Accepting those who engage in motsi ra can never be OK…ever!”

Amen. I am not much of a Jewish conservative as my inclinations are far too frum but maybe its time to visit Shaar Shalom when the next urge to shul it hits.

and your American Cossack foreign policy agenda. The Globe and Mail.

Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon is taking a harder line against Israel’s controversial decision to build settlements in East Jerusalem and now says he condemns the plan. That’s the strongest language to date by a Conservative cabinet minister against Israel. It comes in response to an Israeli plan to build 1,600 new apartments in a Jewish neighbourhood in disputed East Jerusalem.

What’s next from this putz – Canadian soldiers are dying in Afghanistan because a Jew builds a home in Jerusalem or goes to daven at Churva Synagogue? Just one of the many reasons I have nothing but contempt for the Harper styled conservatives – is the no-talent loons who he consistently stacks in his cabinet with.

A few blog posts ago a brief discussion of the rather infamous conduct of (some) Israel police officers came up in the comments. I saw this report at Arutz Sheva this morning and thought – good. Its long past time for citizens to start fighting back against this kind of nefarious conduct by Israeli police.

Judge Irit Cohen ruled that Shomron Police District Intelligence Chief Yaakov Golan wrote three false reports against Yitzhar residents, that Detective Officer Gil Desheh submitted similarly deceptive information to courts on several occasions, and that Police Officer Eliezer Alharar, who served then as Commander of the Serious Crime Unit in the Samaria/Judea Police District, slandered the same residents on the radio and elsewhere.
Yitzhar spokesman Avraham Binyamin said, “It has once again been proven that police reports in the media about Yitzchar are slanders and libels sewn up very coarsely. The lies disseminated by the police against the residents come to cover up their ineptitude, lack of professionalism and chronic negligence in the fight against Arab crime.”

The story at hand began in the summer of 2004 when an Arab shepherd claimed that his flock of sheep had been stolen and was being held in the Shomron town of Yitzar, between Kedumim and Itamar, south of Shechem (Nablus). The police allowed the shepherd to enter Yitzhar, “identify” his flock, and take it back without further ado – over the residents’ protests that the sheep had not been stolen and in fact belonged to them.
Anticipating the residents not to take it lying down, the police waited in ambush – and when some of the former chased after the Arab and their sheep and restored the flock to its Jewish owners, the police promptly arrested the Jews. However, they did not arrest those who retrieved the sheep, but rather the members of the emergency alert team of Yitzhar, who had arrived on the scene not because of the flock, but because of reports that an Arab had infiltrated the town.

Over the next ten days, the four arrested men were held in jail, and their case was brought before three different courts. The evidence against them consisted of reports by policeman Yaakov Golan and appearances by officer Gil Desheh accusing them of “armed robbery.” Three lawyers of the Honenu Civil Rights Organization worked hard to prove that the charges were false, the four were finally freed, and the case against them was ultimately closed. However, the four emergency crew members refused to let the matter end there. With the help of Honenu and Attorney Elad Rosenblatt, they sued the police for damages. Judge Irit Cohen found for the plaintiffs, ruling that “in their enthusiasm to teach the Yitzhar residents a lesson, the police lied both in the courts and to the media.”

But it really doesn’t end there.

Overall it wasn’t a bad week for Israel unless you were one of the ‘left-wing elitist with pretensions of being cliquey opinion-makers, self-serving trend-setters and bon-ton groupies glory in posturing as anti-establishment nonconformists’ as Sarah Honig refers to them. If you are the last week in Israel was verging on a disaster of biblical proportions.

Let us start with the good news. Settlement growth in Samaria and Judea continued to grow, abet more slowly than last year but still at a respectable 4.9%.

Friends of the IDF held a fund raising dinner in New York and managed to raise $20 million at a period of time when virtually everyone with an equity portfolio saw the value of their portfolio cut in half or more. Face it, New York City and suburbs are an expensive place to live.

Tourism in Israel saw a 46% increase over last February.

The Israeli GNP rose higher than predicted, the job market continued to be strong and consumer confidence is at a 10 year high.

The international clothing retailer H&M opened their first store in Israel despite the firestorm of international progressive rage which attempted to sideline the company’s executive business development plan. I doubt H&M will see much of a backlash considering the progressive element are hardly H&M regular clientele. The store opened with much fanfare and 15,000 visitors in its first day of operation. Although, on a personal note, there is an H&M near me and I cannot for the life of me understand why anyone shops there but the Last Amazon loves it.

The historical reconstruction of the 18th century Churva Synagogue in Jerusalem was finally complete and official ceremonies commence on March the 15th. The Jordanian deliberately destroyed it in the Independence war of 1948 not because the shul was used as an ammo dump or staging ground for Israeli forces but to show their utter contempt for anything Jewish.

Ehud Barak, Minister of Defense saw his budget request for increase funding of the IDF’s civil administration branch which is charged with settlement freeze enforcement operations denied, denied, denied.

A record number of Hesder students enlisted in the IDF.

The so-called settlement population grew by 4.9% over last year. Jerusalem Post:

The West Bank settler population grew almost three times faster than that of the country as a whole in the first nine months of 2009. However, the 4.9-percent increase, when compared with the same time last year, shows that for the second year in a row, population growth has slowed down slightly, according to data posted recently on the Central Bureau of Statistics Web site.

Joe Biden and the Obama administration’s faux outrage. Oh, I suspect his ‘outrage’ is real enough but I take a rather contrary view of the whole scenario. Oh, I realize pissing off the Obama Administration and allegedly embarrassing Joe Biden can be considered a ‘bad thing’ in some circles – especially if you are the Obama Administration or part of the Arab world, but in my world its all good.

There never was a building freeze in Jerusalem so crying ‘foul’ now is a little bit too crying about the barn door after all them animals have fled the building. The time for outrage was when the Obama Administration was busy bullying Netanyahu to agree to a ’settlement freeze’ in the first place – although Netanyahu drew the line at Jerusalem and the Obama Administration knew it then and called it all good. So boohoo, and go cry someone else a river.

Secondly, the incidence proves something to the Americans – there are definite limits to their ability to influence in Israeli politics and it illustrates to the Arab world that American influence does have its limits in terms of the Israeli body politic.

Thirdly, building of 1,600 housing units shows the Israelis are resolute about keeping Jerusalem their undivided capital. So all in all, a good week, unless you are the Obama Administration, Joe Biden or a Gush Katif refugee.

Ha’aretz’s Gideon Levy penned this screed to the ’settler’. I really don’t know what to make of Gideon Levy. There is this kind of alternative reality to his writing which always leaves me going – ‘What? What, no…he didn’t just write that did he?!!?’ Usually I have to rub my eyes and then check back to see if anything changed between the time it took to rub my eyes and refocusing on the page…

What constitutes the life of a settler? A house on the cheap; a standard of living above the national average; a job usually subsidized by the government; a fierce religious, nationalist, uncompromising conviction on the justness of his cause; a supportive, heavy-handed social environment; a highway system; transportation arrangements; socially enriching activities; and, at times, a life that comes with the risk of danger.

The settler goes to and from his home without seeing anything. He does not see his neighbors, he does not see the danger he exposes his children to, he does not see the moral baggage he carries on his back. He does not want to see all this, and an entire system surrounds him that makes life easy for him despite his blindness.

Some of the highways on which he drives are cleansed of Palestinians; he has never visited the neighboring villages, not one of whose names he would know were it not for traffic signs pointing in their direction. His teachers, functionaries and rabbis sketch out the scenery that is his world, leaving him no shred of doubt: the Arabs are terrorists, all of them are suspicious packages, and the Jews are allowed to do as they wish, for they are the lords of the land, and there is no other but they.

You can read the rest or not (as you choose) but he goes on and on like this. The rather strange thing is how little this ‘prototype settler’ resembles the ’settlers’ I have known or met. While my experience is merely anecdotal; its strikes me as bizarre, with my wide circle of acquaintances, that I haven’t run across Levy’s Settler except in the writings of various of the hard left-types…

In fact, this characterization is so atypical that I have been mulling over how best to respond to this article before responding via the blog. Then I read this post at The Muqata, and I knew, that nothing I could write would greater illustrate the ‘alternative reality’ quality of Levy’s Settler than Jamal writing at The Muqata about attending a funeral where a 16 year old son, a ’settler’, gave the eulogy for his murdered father.

“AAAAABBBBBBA!!!” [father]

The word was yelled out by Eliyahu — the 16 year old teenage son of Rabbi Meir Chai, murdered in a Palestinian terrorist attack on the roads of the Shomron this past Thursday afternoon.

The first word of the eulogy was yelled out in pain, in sorrow, in mourning.

That first word of the eulogy, the hesped, “Abba”

The painful yell continued, lasting a lifetime, as it reverberated throughout the neighborhoods of Jerusalem, echoing in the hills around us.

I brought my oldest son to the funeral — as he went to school with Eliyahu Chai, is friends with him, and used to frequent our home as well. Before the funeral was about to start, my son asked me what to do. “Go over to your friend…give him a hug.”

And Eliyahu hugged my son, sobbing on his shoulder.

I was shocked by the power of the hesped which Eliyahu delivered.

“Hakol LeTova, HaKol MiShamayim”, Eliyahu sobbed into the microphone, repeating this over and over again. “It’s all for the best, it’s all from Heaven.”

Hearing a son eulogize his tragically murdered father — with such faith that he could repeat “HaKol LeTova” was shocking.

“To all the youth here – you are the best youth there is; I salute you, and I say the same to all our soldiers and to the entire army, to each and every one of you.”

“Continue Abba’s path: Abba wanted faith! Abba wanted Torah study! Abba wanted prayers! Abba couldn’t bear to see youth without tefillin… If we want to immortalize Abba, then we have to do things like that – not external things.

Eliyahu looks like the classic settler “hilltop” youth, lambasted by the media. Long paeyot, a large white knitted kippa. I don’t think the media was prepared for what he said next.

Do not look for revenge, not to beat up Arabs. This is not our solution. The difference between us and them is, that we are human beings! We won’t go to them and kill them just like that; if they come to us [to attack us], we will kill them and put a bullet in their heads, but we won’t go to them!

We are Jews.

May HaShem comfort the mourners of Zion and give them beauty for ashes.

The foreign funded wingnut group Peace Now established a hotline in Israel where you can anonymonously rat out your neighbours for building or construction during the so-called settlement freeze within the disputed territories and promoted it heavily. Well, it appears they got a lot more calls than they bargained for as Israeli nationalists have been burning up the lines. Arutz Sheva:

But instead, many of the calls are from Israeli nationalists – reporting on illegal Arab construction. The calls reporting the Arab violations – as well as “nonsense calls” – are taking up much of the tape on Peace Now’s answering machines, leaving little room for the messages the hotline was intended for. Responding to the onslaught of “incorrect” messages, Peace Now Director Yariv Oppenheimer said that the varied responses, consisting of reports on Arabs, curses, and even jokes, were “entertaining.”

So glad to provide the ‘entertainment’ and let us hope the patriots don’t let up.